Recently, we had a successful launch on Product Hunt, and in this blog, I will share with you what we did, what we learned, and how we achieved the top 10 product list of the day, despite the competition from the numerous shiny AI tools in March.
Before Launch day
We had done a launch a year ago when we started the Convoy journey, so for this launch, we researched and found better ways to achieve our goal of getting to the top 5 products of the day, based on other people's success stories on Product Hunt. Here are some of our findings:
Build a strong community
First, we discovered the power of building a strong community around your product. Leveraging your personal network and that of your team can increase engagement and generate buzz. We also found that social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn can be used to expand your reach.
Follow active Product Hunt users
Second, following active Product Hunt users is an effective way to reach the top 10 products of the day. These early adopters are enthusiastic about discovering new products, and by following them, they can get notified about your launches, generating buzz and increasing engagement. Additionally, active users are more likely to upvote and share your product, increasing visibility on the platform. Though finding active PH users isn't always easy, we were able to find some who followed back and upvoted.
Get a popular Hunter
Third, a popular hunter can significantly increase your chances of success on Product Hunt. Hunters are individuals or companies with a trusted reputation within the community who submit new products to the platform. Product owners, also known as makers on Product Hunt, can also hunt their products. Popular hunters can become influencers, growing a massive following, and significantly boosting the visibility and credibility of your product. Our investor, YC, helped us get Michael Seibel to hunt us, who has hunted hundreds of products on Product Hunt, especially in the devtools category, which Convoy is a part of.
Launch by 12am PT
Timing is everything on Product Hunt. Launch your product during a time when the community is most active or before they get active, the first 10 hours are usually the most active period and most upvotes are gotten within the first 2-3 hours of any launch. You can also consider launching on a day when there are fewer competing products, increasing your chances of standing out. Keep in mind that launching too early or too late can impact your visibility and reduce your chances of making it to the Top 10.
Clear and Concise Messaging
We took our time to draft straight-to-the-point messaging for the launch post, the first maker comment and the tagline. Convoy is a reliable webhooks gateway for engineers that value efficiency. We also made sure to visually show and reinforce our value proposition, in a slideshow manner which Product Hunt lets you do. We also saw that a good percentage of products hunted by Michael that got to Top 10 animated their logos, so we did so too.
On Launch day
Now that we have everything from blobs of texts to share with our community members, to the ones to share on social media and to our investors and even with the YC community, we were ready to launch.
When did we launch?
We launched on a Wednesday at 12 am PT, as our hunter's hunting history showed that products launched on Wednesdays did better than those launched on any other day of the week. We chose and stuck to the time we had already read so much about, and we were ready to share the news with everyone we knew.
Leveraging Community and Investor Networks
We had an internal launch party at Convoy and leveraged personal networks of everyone on the team to share the news about our launch. We reached out to all the communities we were active on, including the YC and OnDeck communities and most especially the Convoy community itself through email and on slack.
We also informed a host of our backers to help us spread word about out launch, and then upvote and leave comments.
Using Twitter & LinkedIn and replying comments
We shared everything on our Twitter and LinkedIn, when our customers left comments about their experience using Convoy to manage their webhooks, we re-shared it on these platforms. This brought even more attention and shares of the launch, some of which led to upvotes.
This was the primary job of the day, we encouraged people to leave comments after they had upvoted and we replied to almost all the comments that was left. Some people also went ahead to leave reviews of the product too as PH allows users to do both.
The Result 🏆
All of these got us to Product #7 of the day and 39th product of the week. Compared to our last launch, we saw a 42% increase in upvotes and a 67% increase in comments. Our project on GitHub received more stars, and we consider this launch to be a success. We are grateful to all members of the Convoy community and everyone who made this launch possible. Although we fell two positions short of our goal of reaching the Top 5 products of the day, we saw massive improvements and will share the lessons we learned about Product Hunt launches in another blog post soon.
